What Do You Believe In? Or Do You?

Saturday there's an eclipse of the Moon in Sagittarius, the sign of faith. This is the Sagittarius Full Moon, and the sensation of the event building is a little like an approaching thunderstorm. The air is heavy with some odd psychic vibe, which it might be with a Full Moon but which is especially palpable when there's an eclipse.

The Sagittarius part of the story describes a question, in particular a question about a belief. If you're the deep type, it can take you to the level of what you have faith in.

This is the last of three eclipses of our current season—and the last of the eclipses across the Gemini-Sagittarius axis that date back about two years. We've just had two eclipses along Taurus-Scorpio, which is the new axis; this is the encore of Gemini-Sagittarius.

As such it may relate to an old question that's coming up again. To me that question is: what do you believe in? The answer to this question has more influence than you might think. In many ways our beliefs are the filter through which we perceive very nearly everything.

The problem with beliefs is that they are often driven by security needs rather than by what we perceive as real, or as necessary. If you eat meat, you have to believe that eating meat is OK. If your husband is a staunch conservative, you may need to believe in conservative values in order to meet an emotional or environmental need.

My take on this eclipse is that it (that is, the circumstances it describes) may prompt you to question something you thought was true, or that you thought mattered to you. You may find yourself unable to believe in what you know is not true for you. If you follow that in (as they say in some kinds of therapy) you may find yourself with an actual question on your hands—a question of faith.

There's a new idea on the horizon—in fact many of them, depicted by the triple conjunction of Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter at the time of this eclipse. This conjunction gives some relief from the persistent questioning that's been leading up to the Full Moon eclipse. Yes it's in Gemini, although clarity (Mercury), substance (Venus), and wisdom (Jupiter) are all available there in varying combinations.

One subject described by the chart involves what we do with persistent fear. That's a fact of the times we're living in, where What to Be Scared Of is being broadcast on every channel. Anyone who watches TV or follows news on the 'Net was treated this week to a constant vision of a town shredded by a tornado.

With or without a topic to graft onto, many people are caught in some form of persistent anxiety, fear or panic, and spend a lot of their time dealing with it. Much of this fear stems from various efforts to control—the ones exerted on us, and the ones that we exert on the world, often out of necessity. When that control spins out of control, one approach is to escape, or to try to—and that's exactly the pattern that Saturday's eclipse is here to awaken us to.

If you'd like an astrological reading that covers the eclipses we're currently experiencing, I've prepared one for each of the 12 signs—available here.